Reticulated sp(l)ine.

Accidentally half ate a catepillar once.

It crawled into the bag of snacking cheerios on a camping trip.

… still feed bad about accidentally killing that little guy.

I guess also maybe you could count earning my redwings, though it wasn’t like I was ingesting it, and frankly, I didn’t even find it disgusting at all, but it seems most people are disgusted by this.

I’ve done a good bit of martial arts, am quite used to the taste of my own blood in my mouth… hers was basically just a slightly different flavor of blood.

No. Wrong.

As others have outlined in greater detail… no, you’d have a massive simplification and standardization of such forms, thus a massive reduction in the amount of ‘needed’ work of such kind.

The entire way the modern US healthcare system works is by making there be so many abstract layers and processes going on at the same time, that it requires an inordinate amount of time and effort to even actually map out what those layers and processes are, much less who is actually responsible for what particular decision or mistake.

And that is the point of it. Its is insanely complex and opaque by design, because it allows them do functionally do whatever they want, and be able to say its all done for compliance’s sake.

So, yeah, if you just flatten all that… ~90% of it no longer needs to exist.

Or… the real funny part here is… if we stick with the system as it is, well, this kind of shit is gonna be done by LLMs. So we will probably end up having the same employment void developing under the current hypercapitalist paradigm as well.

I mean, this has been well established by various psychological studies for like 30 years now, at least.

You don’t have a belief, you have an accurate understanding of reality.

Higher ups in most hierarchichal organizations are significantly more narcissistic than average people.

I have a motivational quote for them!

“Everybody has a plan, untill they get punched in the mouth.”

Wow, are we going to learn that sunny days tend to be warm, and the sky tends to be blue, next?

I’ve been saying this since the Return to Office shit started: A huge part of it is narcissist management that need the narcissistic supply of being able to excercise power and judgement over others, in person.

… the other part is that if you don’t actually need all that office space, well, then all the fraud and money laundering in commercial real estate gets significantly harder to hide.

Yep, you’re not wrong.

The healthcare industry is… cancerous, in that way.

But… you can say that we need societal chemo, and you can also say that kind of bullshit job is exactly whats going to get automated out of existence by LLMs, if we just keep doing hyper capitalism healthcare.

Approximately 1-2 million people employed in the mass bureacracy of claims processing and validation would lose their jobs.

That’s how much of a gargantuan amount of bullshit the healthcare industry is, its so big that at this point, assuming the rest of the economy was doing fine, switching to universal health care would create a moderate recession, because so many bullshit jobs would no longer need to exist.

Obviously it would be a massive net economic benefit, but at this point, medicine is gonna sting a bit.

The real answer is that love bombing is simply a behavior pattern that can be benign, or beneficial, or destructive.

A healthy way it might play out would be:

Initial infatuation ->

-> communication leads to deeper and more wholistic appreciation ->

-> moderation into a mutually comfortable new status quo.

But, the way tiktok understands the term is closer to ‘anyone who is really nice to you and gives you a lot of attention, for no apparent reason, is potentially intentionally executed a fully consciously premeditated plan to manipulate you and then throw you away afterward.’

Can that happen?

Yep.

How can you tell the difference, before hand?

Uh, you basically can’t, not right from step one anyway.

Presuming they’re both ~19, I’m going with potentially <-> likely uh, all of the above, + completely terrified.

First loves are… pretty confusing.

Death is not ultimately escapable.

You are not permanent; one day, you will go to sleep, and not wake up again.

… but you do have the power to influence the path you walk on the way toward death, the face you’ll be wearing, the stories you’ll be able to tell, when you finally arrive in the company of the reaper.

You can be secure in knowing that it is not possible to escape this fate… and in knowing that you lived not in an impossible attempt to avoid the unavoidable, but instead, that you chose to tread the path as you saw fit to.

The Greek Gods were said to be envious of us mortals, because our mortality meant that what we did with our one life… was important, and meaningful, in a way that nothing the Gods ever did, could be.

When you realize that nothing objectively ‘matters’, to ‘the universe’… you are now free, to decide what matters to you, instead.

A fool and his money are quick to part ways.

… I’m still adhering to ‘Remember: No Preorders’, from fucking 15 years ago now.

Everybody else just opts in to get financially hosed down and flatlined like random innocent Russian civillians in an airport.

Same question:

Why are funko pops?

Same answer.

Well if they keep going with the GTA5/RDR2 framework, it would be Shark Cards/Gold, and a two tier in game currency system.

Give them real money, you get in game currency 1 or 2, some in game items cost currency 1, some cost ingame currency 2.

They set the ‘exchange rates’, as well as prices of special items, and they set the increment amounts you can buy ingame crncy 1 and 2 for, such that for ingame purchase combos they know are likely, well you have to spend a little bit more real world money and have some leftover ingame currency.

They basically wrote the book on using psychologically manipulative dark patterns in system structuring and UI design for this sort of stuff.

GTA Online is a ludicrous money printer in the way Steam is a money printer for Valve.

… But with Steam you’re getting, you know, new games. With Rockstar, you’re getting bling and overpowered vehicles snd weapons to troll people with.

Now… I don’t think they’d extend the ingame currency to be something you could purchase for single player GTA6. That seems like it just be waay too much, even for them, it would make single player into as much of a pay 2 win joke as GTA5 Online is.

But I guess its not impossible?

And, perhaps ironically… that’s kinda part of the point.

Valve literally presents the Steam Machine as a possible gaming device for the open ecosystem they ‘religiously’ believe in.

But not the only possible gaming device.

The original idea of the Steam Machine, over a decade ago, wss that it would basically be a performance and component spec standard, basically just a known quantity of kinds of hardware that they could say ‘Steam and most games on it will run on something that meets these standards!’

There actually were a number of pc builders that did their own attempt at making their own version of a ‘Steam Machine’.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine?wprov=rarw1

Valve is here, now, doing basically the same thing, they just… literally built their own benchmark as an exemplar device, and also now have an operating system to actually center the entire concept around.

I think they’d be greatly pleased if this new Steam Machine, version 2, actually spurred on other manufacturers to make their own… just like how Valve keeps working to make SteamOS work well on other handheld PCs, made by other manufacturers.

Its because most people have a childish understanding of complex issues that basically boils down to ‘thing either bad or good’, ‘thing either perfect or evil’.

Fanboy/girlism applies to sociopolitical idologies too.

Its easier to perform purity testing to establish yourself as a morally/logically consistent person, its easier to criticize flaws…

… than it is to realize the fundamental strategy that has to be involved in achieving any kind of change from the world as it is, to the world as you’d prefer it to be… than it is to think about broad patterns underlying decision making, as well as what those broad patterns could lead to, in a complex world with other actors who have other ideologies/behavior patterns.

You can argue that this kind of fast-food opinion/judgement formation is itself a personality aspect caused or exacerbated by the instant gratification of modern digital hypercapitalism.

Like, I don’t think Valve or Gabe are perfect moral actors, I don’t agree with literally everything they do or espouse.

But… on net? In the big picture? Nearly every other major or even notable actor in the space is morally atrocious in comparison to them, and many things that Valve does are effective counter pressures to those much more atrocious things.

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/112343/gta-6-is-a-singleplayer-experience-gta-online-may-be-sold-separately/index.html

GTA 6 is a ‘singleplayer experience,’ GTA Online may be sold separately

Rockstar Games and Sony seem to confirm GTA 6 will be a singleplayer game, possibly indicating that the next version of GTA Online could be standalone.

… (bunch of examples of Rockstar repeatedly describing GTA 6 as ‘a single player experience’ consistently across all of its marketing material, everywhere) …

This gave Rockstar lots of flexibility in how gamers interact with the game itself–which has splintered into two very distinct offerings–and many analysts believed and took for granted that Rockstar would simply ship GTA Online as a free component within GTA 6’s base game.

If I had to guess, I would say that Rockstar is currently preparing to essentially translate the existing version of GTA Online, which takes place in Los Santos, to the other side of the country in Vice City’s crime-ridden streets.

It’s possible we could see the current iteration of GTA Online go into retirement as Rockstar moves into the next version, however, all of this takes time and a lot of manpower and money, so it’s possible that the new version of GTA Online simply isn’t ready yet.

GTA+ would probably be involved in this process in some way, potentially offering access to GTA Online by default while also adding in extras and bonuses like vehicles and weapons.

So yeah my guess would be that they do a two pronged approach of either:

You buy GTA Online 2 as a standalone game

or

You have a GTA + monthly subscription, which gives you both access to GTA Online 2, and also basically a ‘battlepass’ or w/e, monthly perks.

But with the latter, stop the subscription? Well there goes your GTA Online 2 access.

You can do both too, of course.

They already figured out that you could split RDR2 and GTA5 into ‘singleplayer + multiplayer’ and ‘just multiplayer’.

Why not just also have ‘just single player’?

You don’t have to be a bad person.

… you can wait untill it comes to PC, we’ll get it cracked eventually, at least single player.

Those old GTA 6 alpha leaks are still out there.

I actually had a copy at one point… I’m sure someone still does, and I’m sure examining it can be useful.

But uh yeah, fire a whole bunch of devs right before release?

That’s AAA industry standard, been that way for like 15 years now, they basically all do that.

$100 if you want:

The entire map / all interactive world locations.

The entire story.

Ability to customize vehicles.

All of the game’s vehicles.

All of personal cosmetic customization options, such as clothes, tattoos, makeup, etc.

All of the weapon customization options.

So really, the actual game is $100 dollars, that does not include Online, but there’s a slimmed down poor person edition available for $80 bucks.

GTA Online 2 or w/e looks like its gonna be a monthly subscription to even access it.

Oh also there are no physical editions.

None.

All digital, the ‘physical’ is just a code in a box.

Now, the actual ‘extra’ content in the Ultimate Edition is an 80s/Vice City/Miami Vice cosmetic pack.

But the reality is that the broke ass bitch version is a stripped down version of the actual game, which is the Ultimate Edition.

Its true, and its more true everyday.

More and more traffic is servers or bots or LLMs, talking to eachother.

We’re the minority now, us humans, talking to other humans.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/bots-now-outnumber-humans-on-the-internet-heres-what-that-actually-means/

https://cybersecuritynews.com/bots-surpass-humans-in-web-traffic/

Like the dinosaur… You had your time.

This future is our world. The future is our time.